Bahá’í Faith

• In the New York City Baha’i Center, housed in a refurbished theater in lower Manhattan, Baha’is host live jazz  concerts every Tuesday evening in the center’s John Birks Gillespie Auditorium, dedicated to the late jazz great—and Baha’i—Dizzy Gillespie.

• At the Native American Baha’i Institute, located on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona, Native American Baha’is have built a circular prayer hall that is the focal point for educational and social services that benefit the entire region.

• In rural South Carolina, African American men come together for the Black Men's Gathering at the Louis Gregory Baha’i Institute, a retreat inspired by the life of Louis Gregory, a contemporary and colleague of W.E.B. DuBois, who embraced the Baha’i Faith in 1909 and devoted the remainder of his life to championing race unity.

• At Green Acre, a Baha’i spiritual retreat center in Maine, Baha’i actors reenact episodes from the life of Sarah Farmer, a pioneer in the interfaith movement who played an important role in the American spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.

These are snapshots of the Baha'i community in the United States, a community that has grown steadily since the Baha'i Faith arrived in the United States in the late 1890s. Today more than 165,000 Baha'is live in every state of the union [see map], including on over 100 Indian reservations. The U.S. Baha'i population reflects the racial and cultural diversity of the American people and includes about 10,000 Iranian Baha'i refugees who fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The largest Baha'i populations are in California, Georgia, Illinois, South Carolina and Texas.

A Vision of America's Spiritual Destiny

The American nation, Baha'is believe, will evolve through tests and trials to become a land of spiritual distinction and leadership, a champion of justice and unity among all peoples and nations, and a powerful servant of the cause of everlasting peace, the peace promised by God in the sacred texts of the world's religions. To achieve this destiny, however, our nation must overcome several persistent spiritual challenges—removing every trace of racism from our hearts, embracing the equality of women in every department of life, eliminating the inordinate disparity between rich and poor, transforming a limited nationalism to the love of humanity as a whole, and in humility before God, submerge religious prejudices in a great spirit of mutual forbearance that will enable us to work together for the advancement of human understanding and peace. These are among the preeminent goals of the U.S. Baha'i community.